Android's open source nature makes it vastly easier to learn about than closed source OSes. As such, I want to address several misconceptions about the platform that constantly come up. This article will be occasionally updated on an ongoing basis as I think of more topics to include.

GMS

GMS actually stood for Google Mobile Suite, not Google Mobile Services, at least originally. So many people assumed it stood for the latter that even Google seems to use it now.

Perhaps it was a situation like Qualcomm’s Gobi, its cellular firmware API that so many people confused for a modem brand that eventually Qualcomm gave up and rebranded its modems to Gobi. Or Samsung’s ISOCELL, the deep trench isolation implementation that so many people thought was Samsung’s camera brand, that it also recently gave up and branded its CMOS image sensors as ISOCELL at Mobile World Congress 2017.

Force quitting apps

If memory serves, with Android X.X (can someone please remind me?), swiping away an app in the multitasking UI no longer force quit even the background services of an app in AOSP. Swiping away apps can actually still force quit them on a specific device, though, depending on the vendor’s chosen implementation.

If, however, an app is actually stalled or causing real problems in the background, you may have to manually force quit it. But in general, avoid doing so. Be nice to your NAND’s endurance, folks.

Project Treble

Based on recent changes to AOSP, Treble appears to be an attempt at a stable driver API. By painfully rewriting its various HALs to conform to a new standardized hardware IDL, the Android team is speeding up Android updates by enabling silicon and device vendor bring-up efforts to be more parallelized, and by making updates a bit more economically viable for the silicon vendors. This does not mean, however, that SoC vendor support no longer matters at all. It’s a huge deal, but it’s not the same thing as having a stable driver ABI. See: Fuchsia.

F2FS

F2FS is a file system developed by Samsung LSI and upstreamed into Linux. It was designed for NAND flash memory and is claimed to be faster than ext4, Android’s default file system. The Android team disputes this based on its own testing, and says it sees no significant performance differences between the two. Regardless, there are several issues with F2FS, and more importantly Google cannot hardware accelerate file-based encryption with it. There isn’t a pressing need to replace ext4, though of course a better, more feature-rich file system could always supercede it.

Security

Malware on Android is often portrayed as an ever-growing, constant crisis. While Android does have tons of major security concerns, the overall issue is still hugely overstated.

Firstly, the term malware can mean absolutely anything. The vast majority of stories about mobile security spread FUD and sensationalism, to the detriment of readers. I won’t pretend to be a security expert, but even imperfect sandboxing probably goes a long way compared to the completely unsandboxed traditional PC application environments. It doesn’t seem clear to me whether Android or macOS is more secure overall, for example. As with many things, it probably depends.

There is however an extreme case: the Chinese market. Because Android is out of Google’s control in China, the OS genuinely is a security nightmare in the country. I remember waiting for a flight at the airport in Beijing and watching with amusement as some seemingly low-threat app started downloading itself onto my phone over the air. All I did was merely have Wi-Fi on; I hadn’t attempted to connect to any access points.

Everyone knows the fundamental issue with Android security: the horrible update problem. If devices consistently received timely updates for multiple years, the perception of Android’s security architecture would be radically different. I would personally attribute that to licensing and Linux's deliberately non-stable driver ABI, but there are a few hundred other opinions out there on the matter. And of course the overall topic of security is much, much more complex than what I am addressing here.

Which leads us to...

Android Things

What is Android Things, really? Why is it a distinct platform from Android, in other words? One very important difference is how Google manages the BSPs (board support packages) and drivers for Android Things. It works with the silicon vendors but provides the BSPs itself. Device vendors cannot modify the behavior of kernel drivers or HALs. Developers that need to add drivers for peripheral devices to add to their baseboard are able to write user space drivers, unsurprisingly called user drivers.

Furthermore, the intersection of updates and the Internet of Things would seem to be an obvious disaster, so how does Google address the issue? The company is actually releasing monthly BSP security patches through its Developer Console that soon roll out directly to devices, with the caveat that the direct updates will only be for the same platform version of Android the device is on (such as, say, 7.X Nougat).

Project Brillo is not exactly the same thing as Android Things. Brillo was killed, and the initiative was changed in terms of goals and morphed into Android Things. The Accessory Development Kit (ADK) was also somewhat of a predecessor to Android Things.

Android Wear

Touch latency

To oversimplify: Android touch latency was never good, until Android 7.1 essentially finally “solved” the problem. Additional features were added to the new Hardware Composer 2 (HWC2) HAL in 7.1 which can reduce touch latency by up to 20ms, or 1.2 frames, but not always. (It is not correct to say that touch latency is simply 20ms faster in 7.1.) According to the Android team, this was done by staggering some operations on batched input events, not doing everything on the VSync frame boundary, in order to reduce the likelihood of triple buffering and the increased latency that it causes.

The improvement in touch latency is extremely noticeable, and it immediately impressed me on the Nexus 6P after installing 7.1. While the HWC2 improvements make a huge difference, silicon and device vendor implementations still matter! A device still needs to have a quality touch controller, touch stack, and associated software. There are also other parameters that can be tuned by vendors, such as move sensitivity, which should vary based on device size.

It’s also important to understand that touch and general input responsiveness is a function of rendering performance. This is why, say, G-SYNC improves input latency when it manages to improve performance, and especially when exceeding 60fps under VSync. Thus on any device, the higher the realized display refresh rate, the lower the input latency. This is how Adaptive-Sync and proprietary variable refresh implementations will soon benefit Android touch latency.

Graphics rendering

For years people have debated the causes of Android’s infamous “lag” problem. The causes of jank on Android have never been as simple as a binary distinction of whether the OS is hardware-accelerated (running graphics operations on the GPU to some extent) or not. I have no idea what the true reasons are, but I do know that Android’s rendering pipeline is extremely complicated and requires graphics expertise to really understand. At the end of the day, most signs point to initial design decisions made in the early days of Android that are not easily undone.

While many have unrealistically hoped for a single “performance boosting thing,” Android performance does constantly improve in each new release. As previously discussed, one interesting new feature introduced in O is an optional new graphics renderer. (Updated explanation: the option just replaces hwui's GL renderer with Skia's GL renderer.) Skia's renderer will probably be made the default GL renderer in Android P.

Variable refresh

One thing to note is that adaptive sync/refresh will benefit Android more than Apple’s ProMotion benefits iOS.

Color

No vendor should target anything other than sRGB for a device display until Android O ships. In other words, the display’s software calibration must target sRGB to be correct, because that is the only color space that Android currently supports.

I hope this article at least conveys how almost all engineering decisions involve tradeoffs. There are rarely magic bullets that solve everything.